A True Beauty!

One of my friends in the Birmingham Quilters Guild is Judy Cloe.  At our annual retreat, she usually sews directly in front of me, so I get to see everything she works on up close and personal.  I've always been impressed with her fabric choices.  She uses unusual prints and colors, and puts them together in amazing ways.  For a few years, she's been working on this New York Beauty quilt at retreats.  I've seen many of the blocks in progress.  

A few days ago she sent me this photo of the finished quilt.  WOW!  Isn't it gorgeous?!  I've been telling Judy for a couple of years that she has changed the way I buy fabric (that is when I actually DID buy fabric).  The coolest fabrics I used to purchase were set aside in my "Judy Cloe Collection."  She probably thought I was pulling her leg, so I'll prove it here:
Sorry, Judy, that you have to share a drawer with small squares!

Here's another slice of our guild's Starry Night slice challenge.  Someone in the group has had some recent deaths in her family and wasn't able to do her slice.  I decided I'd do it for her, using only my felting/embellishing machine.  So it's all done with wool felt, and silk and wool roving.  I started it yesterday afternoon and finished it this morning.
While I was surfing the Net last night, I ran across a blog with the most creative dress I've ever seen. - a dress made completely with fabric selvages.  It's worth a peek - click here to see it.

Of course that got my brain rattling!  If someone can make an entire dress with selvages, maybe I could make a simple little quilt.  So here it is.  I think I may use embroidery floss and tie it.  
My husband and I have been married so long now (almost 25 years!) that nothing I do surprises him very much anymore.  He often comes home from work to find something unusual in the kitchen, because often whatever project I'm working on seems to migrate down the stairs from my studio.

But today even he may be a bit confused or bemused because this is currently on the kitchen counter:
It's a metal sculpture of a dog that holds two bowls for my dogs to drink water.  I've been wanting to try the recently publicized technique for using rust to dye fabric.  This was the only rusty thing I could find around our house.  So I got a few pieces of my PFD (prepared for dye) fabric, saturated it in vinegar, and wrapped it around the rusty spots.  I'll show the finished product tomorrow when it's dry.

Maybe my husband will think the sculpture is going to be a mummy for Halloween.